Poll

Proposed appeals fee would make sure people who want to take up the right do it responsibly

Date: 17/2/2017

Planning magazine reports that the Housing White Paper proposes to introduce a fee of up to £2,000 for making an appeal to deter applicants from making frivolous appeals and provide additional income for the Planning Inspectorate to employ inspectors, and yet some observers say this is unlikely to prove succesful.

Mike Kiely, Chair of the Board of the Planning Officers Society, expects the fee to be scaled so that private individuals wanting to extend their homes would face appeal fees of no more than around £100. "If you are extending your house, you might be spending £40,000 on a single storey extension," he said. In such cases, the fee would be "a very small amount of money". He added that attaching a cost to something is a common public policy tool "of making sure people who want to take up a right do it responsibly".

Kiely, said that he is "not aware of any evidence of a large number of pointless appeals", but added that "councils win roughly two-thirds of them, which suggest perhaps that a third are no-hopers".

Kiely is optimistic about increasing resources for the Inspectorate: "PINS deal with about 20,000 appeals a year. If the fee is a £1,000 average, that would be £20 million - even if it's half that, that's a lot of money, so that should give them the ability to employ quite a few inspectors. So it will provide resources if they get to keep the money."